Kenyan widow in US court to harvest husband’s sperms
A doctor using an Intra Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection machine which carries out a procedure where a single sperm is injected directly to an egg. A Kenyan widow has moved to a US court to harvest her husband’s sperms. FILE
He killed himself, but his Manhattan widow wants him to live on — through the children she hopes to create with sperm extracted from his corpse.
A grieving Victoria Chege implored a Manhattan judge for permission this week to harvest her husband George Kamau’s sperm in a desperate last bid to become the mother she believes she is destined to be.
“Time is of the essence,” she wrote in court papers filed on Thursday last week — three days after Mr Kamau’s death.
“The sperm (of the) deceased Mr George Kamau must be harvested and frozen as soon as possible from the time of his death or it will be useless.”
Chege claimed Kamau, 37, who killed himself October 11 in Norwalk, Connecticut, would have approved of the request to father a virgin birth.
“Kamau expressed his desire to have children so that his legacy may continue,” she wrote, adding he “would have consented” to her desire to create a family.
Adding to the drama, she explained that she needed the sperm “so that Etaghua Asefa, family friend and appointed surrogate (mother), may someday give birth to the child he wanted but was prevented from conceiving.”
The Sperm and Embryo Bank of New Jersey told her it wouldn’t do the procedure without a court order.
Although Justice Shirley Werner Kornreich almost immediately signed off on the unusual request to allow Mr Kamau to procreate from the grave, the results are far from certain.
Fertility experts say sperm must be taken from a corpse within 36 hours of death to be viable for storage and impregnation. But Kamau was dead for at least 60 hours by the time the order was signed.
The sperm bank did not return a call for comment, and Chege’s lawyer declined to discuss the issue.
The case is believed to be the second of its kind in New York.
Last year, Bronx state Supreme Court Justice Howard Sherman signed off on a petition by the fiancée of Johnny Quintana to extract his sperm after he died of an apparent heart attack.
The order enabled a doctor to go to work 32 hours after Quintana’s death — but the heartbroken fiancée, Gisela Marrero, later learned the sperm was no longer viable.
